katzgrau

Or, there is no time. Awareness traverses the grand graph of possibility.

Disclaimer: total armchair philosophy.

Thought the same. This is showing highly concentrated “lighthouses” along a river in my area.

All this said, I wonder what it’s like being on the receiving end of Google. The number of personal, emotional and existential queries is probably pretty significant.

But if you said that you were migrating from another platform to Claude, my guess is that it would have happily found and converted AGENTS.md

> crackhead@blorb.localhost

Checks out, and I mean that in the kindest way possible

My block is crawling with kids and usually playing baseball or hockey - they are pretty much never on screens apart from watching something on Disney+. Other than that we play outside year round.

Really just thoughtfully and consistently disciplined. Some people think diet and exercise are miserable. Others put more weight on how they feel when in good health.

I love my work and I love playing with the kids so it can be exhausting but in a good way. Never a drag (not usually anyway).

Super thoughtful consistent schedule with little room for anything else is my tradeoff if I want to maintain high quantity of high quality output with my business. And TBH, it lasts for 15-18 years at most.

I didn’t mention the weekends - those are more of a free for all. Lots of family time, work sneaks in. It’s a lot more thinking than working though.

Granted, I do need to take a break from that schedule every so often. If I catch myself being unfocused I just go to bed.

Also, the first thing I work on is usually a high leverage project that excites me. Reading news or answering emails (things that can affect my emotions) are usually avoided during that time. Usually.

YC reject so I bootstrapped and was thankfully able to hit profitability before my first kid showed up. I’ve now got two. I also have dreams bigger than ever.

In fact, writing this while sitting on the couch with the kids watching Muppet Treasure Island while my kids are wearing pirate hats and waving foam swords.

I’m still extremely productive and prolific. Probably less compared with before. But before, I had friends and TV shows subtracting from my time.

Today, my life priorities are kids, work and sleep.

There is no Netflix. There are no hobbies. No downtime. No friends unless I happen to like my kids friends parents.

I’m up at 5:30/6 and get 90 mins of focused work in. Skip breakfast. Then workout and walk/bike with the kids. Then ready for work at 10 - and thankfully my office is two blocks away. Skip lunch. Home at 5/5:30. Dinner with kids and play. Work from 8-10. Every single day.

I love my kids, work and learning is fun, and I value sleep. Everything else is a nice to have.

The way I see it, when I’m 100 years old I won’t regret drag on my ambitions because I had kids. In fact I’ll probably think the ambitions were nice but kind of pointless in the end anyway. I will see the kids as important and meaningful, and will write a life story where I was the best dad I could be and still hustled like hell.

Same thought - 80% through reading it occurred to me to check the citations. A few items from 2025 and most well before that.

So much has changed since late 2025 one can’t really draw any conclusions from this.

In fact, I’m guessing things will continue to move so fast that by the time one were to execute a survey of developers, many of the responses and findings are no longer relevant.

No nuclear apocalypse yet.

Nice.

Plenty of startups have tried the “penny per article” approach and failed. They might get 20% of the penny on behalf of the publisher - who has to get 1M pageviews to get $10k.

Hard to build a business that requires changing user behavior on pennies. Seriously, make the math and strategy work - requires a Herculean effort to hit ramen profitability for all involved.

Pursuit of growth

> This article describes drone physics. Audience should have familiarity with introductory linear algebra, introductory calculus, and introductory classical mechanics.

Having familiarity with all 3, as soon as I read this sentence I knew it was all down hill for me.

The real unlock is at line 149 of bin/burn

The issue is that it’s relatively low effort to make false and unverified claims. Defending and refuting it is a much higher effort task for the person doing the work to everyone else’s benefit.

RubyLLM dev literally had to take time to provide code samples and doc links.

No issue with listing legit limitations, but be a bro and fact check claims before wasting a volunteer’s time - and potentially leading other developers on a public board astray.

“Yak shaving”

It’s a classic move.

Start a new diet, so you join a gym and or buy a bunch of workout stuff.

I won’t knock it though. An important minority of my yak-shaving endeavors have led to long term positive outcomes.

> It probably would’ve been easier if I didn’t use Rust and just used the Arduino libraries, or if I used a different board. But I was really married to this blog post title idea

Worth it, nicely done

There’s a lot of meeting hate here and as a developer, I used to feel the same.

But after bootstrapping a SaaS company and at times struggling through cross-team execution, I’ve come around. A short weekly standing meeting, like the one described in the book The 4 Disciplines of Execution, is actually a powerful tool.

Without it, maintenance, admin, and firefighting will expand to fill the entire week. The meeting forces space for focus, clear commitments, and basic accountability.

It’s not obvious early in your career, but once you’ve got some scars, it starts to make a lot more sense.

When your dreams and visions die, you don’t have any reason to believe in yourself, and you’re pretty much the walking dead

When you’re deep in a thoughtful read and suddenly get the eerie feeling that you’re being catfished

> But the real threat isn't either of those things. It's quieter, and more boring, and therefore more dangerous. The real threat is a slow, comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing. Not a dramatic collapse. Not Skynet. Just a generation of researchers who can produce results but can't produce understanding. Who know what buttons to press but not why those buttons exist. Who can get a paper through peer review but can't sit in a room with a colleague and explain, from the ground up, why the third term in their expansion has the sign that it does.

I’ve seen this too. And with AI, it’s empowered even more people to spam, imitate, steal and remix others’ work, research and artistic expression.

The big grift is on - and sadly, our fearless leader is the epitome of it.

I think you missed the point of the parent comment.

The money (from advertising) that used to go to news now goes elsewhere (Google and Meta).

It’s left very little in terms of resources for staff.

Think about what the quality of commercial software would be like if there wasn’t enough money for QA and testers and top tier devs capped out at $180k with starting roles at 30k and 40k.

That’s the news industry right now. Poorer quality product.

As a news publisher (RedBankGreen.com) I’ll tell you that pretty much nobody is in it for the money anymore, at least at the local level.

It’s passion and love of the community, despite the many struggles and drawbacks.

AI bots scrape our content and that drastically reduces the number of people who make it to our site.

That impacts our ability to bring on subscribers and especially advertisers - Google and Meta own local advertising and AI kills the relatively tiny audience we have.

I dread the day that it happens in realtime - hear sirens? Ask AI who already scraped us.

A few things:

1. You can't judge the person, you can judge the behavior

2. To judge the person requires the ability to quantify the unquantifiable (circumstance, sequence of events leading to the outcome, going back to the literal beginning of time).

3. To judge the person implies a superiority to that person

Sure, one can take/justify simplistic shortcuts for practical reasons. But some forget that's what they are - shortcuts that bypass the nuances/reality of the situation.

The role of cause and effect is unshakeable.

> If everyone would make the same choice, then free will doesn't exist. It's only one step away from what you said.

I didn't say anything about free will. "One step away" is where you went, not me.

If you believe free will and determinism are logically incompatible, that's your own theory to prove.

I'm simply saying that everyone would make the same choice given the exact same circumstances and starting conditions.

To believe anything otherwise is magical thinking, and basically implies a moral superiority to someone else.

I didn’t say anything about free will. What I did say is irrefutable.

> It presumes people do not have choices.

No, there are choices. It states that given the exact same starting parameters and sequence of events, you would make the same choice.

It’s not really subjective if you don’t believe it’s your place to judge the human to begin with.

If you were in their exact life circumstance and environment you would do the same thing. You aren’t going to magically sidestep cause and effect.

The act itself is bad.

The human performing the act was misguided.

I view people as inherently perfect whose view of life, themselves, and their current situations as potentially misguided.

Eg, like a diamond covered in shit.

Just like it’s possible for a diamond to be uncovered and polished, the human is capable of acquiring a truer perspective and more aligned set of behaviors - redemption. Everyone is capable of redemption so nobody is inherently bad. Thinking otherwise may be convenient but is ultimately misguided too.

So the act and the person are separate.

Granted, we need to protect society from such misguidedness, so we have laws, punishments, etc.

But it’s about protecting us from bad behavior, not labeling the individual as bad.